“If you want to build any kind of game for mobile platforms, you’ve got to take a look at Unity. This book is an excellent, thorough, and seriously fun guide to putting together gameplay in one of the best game engines out there for indie developers.”

“The best way to learn how to use a game engine is by getting your hands dirty and building your own projects. In this book, Paris and Jon guide you through the creation of two radically different games, giving you invaluable hands-on experience with a wide range of Unity’s features.”

– Alec Holowka, Lead Developer of “Night in the Woods” and “Aquaria” at
Infinite Ammo

“This book changed my life. I now feel inner peace, and I’m pretty sure I can see through time.”

Unlike most of our other talks, we did something a little ridiculous with this one – we built an entire presentation system, from scratch, into Night in the Woods. We’re actually pretty proud of this, and so we put together a video showing how it was done. Check it out!

Over the last weekend I took place in GovHack 2016 at the Hobart site. This was the 4th time that I’ve participated in GovHack, and – as usual – it was an excellent event! I formed (what is now becoming the usual) team with Jon, Tim, Josh, Rex, Seb, Matthew, and Arabella, and we built a game out of the data-sets.

The game we built involves players taking control of news readers on flying news desks, grabbing images and matching them to headlines. It’s called Beat the Press and you can learn more about it on the project website, and through the video we made:

Thanks to my awesome team members for working so hard on art, music, data-wrangling, copy editing, video production, programming, design, and game design over the weekend! Thanks also to Craig Clark for hosting a fabulous event, as well as the other volunteers in Hobart, and everywhere else!

At the beginning of May, Jon and I visited Atlanta, Georgia, for IA Summit 2016. This is the second time we’ve attended at the IA Summit: last time was in 2012, in New Orleans. This year, we presented the latest iteration of our game design talk, “How Do I Game Design?”.

As promised during our talk, here’s links to a couple of the things we talked about:

I really enjoyed our second visit to the IA Summit, and definitely hope to come back next year! A particular highlight of the conference was the games night, which is quite unique to the IA Summit –– I love it! Highlights from the talks include:

Léonie Watson’s keynote about accessibility and inclusion, which featured a slide deck composed of movie quotes.

… but everything I attended was amazing. There’s lots of great photos of the event, not taken by me, online here. Thanks to the organisers, volunteers, speakers, and attendees for putting on an amazing event!

IA Summit 2016 was one of the most diverse-feeling, inclusive conferences I’ve ever been to, and the community –– while, as game designers, we only really sit on the intersection of it and many other communities –– is incredibly welcoming and friendly.

Atlanta was also an amazingly friendly city, with a lot of interesting attracting (oh my, go and visit the Georgia Aquarium!) I’m looking forward to getting an opportunity to revisit it in the future! I’m also really looking forward to venturing to Vancouver, for IA Summit 2017.

The first Early Release of our latest book is now available from O’Reilly: Mobile Game Development with Unity. We’re incredibly excited about this release; this is a book we’ve been dreaming of writing for many, many years, and we’ve finally had the chance to do so. Thanks to our amazingly patient editors, Rachel, who let us write this book, and Brian, who is making sure it’s as awesome as possible!

The new book covers game development with Unity, the increasingly-popular game development environment and game engine. We teach a little touch of game design, the fundamentals of Unity, and then we teach you how to build two full games: “Gnome’s Well”, a 2D game similar to Angry Birds, or Flappy Bird, and “Rock Fall”, a 3D space-asteroid shooting game.

The games built through the book are a lot of fun, and we’ve put a lot of thought into crafting games that are both representative of common, successful games in the mobile world, and contain enough interesting challenges for developers, artists, and the like, that they represent a valid real-world game development experience.

The first Early Release of the book contains early drafts of the chapters that explore the creation of both games, Gnome’s Well and Rock Fall, as well as a skeleton of the first chapter, which outlines the basics of Unity. The next Early Release, which we hope to have ready sometime in mid-December, will contain drafts of the Scripting chapter, and a completed draft of the first chapter.

We’re looking forward to seeing what people build after reading the book, and working through the games we teach in it. We’re really excited at the prospect of helping more people get into game development!

You can buy the Early Release over on the O’Reilly website. Buying it gets you all updates during the Early Release process, as well as the final copy of the book. If you have any questions, suggestions for things to add/cover, or find something unclear in the book, please don’t hesitate to email us: unitybook@secretlab.com.au. We’re so excited about this book, and can’t wait to improve it, finish it, and get more releases out for it!